In some situations it may be necessary for a person to speak with a number of people at once at the spur of the moment. For example, a parent may wish to call all their teenage children at the end of the school day to arrange the rest of the afternoon. Or a person may wish to call a group of friends to plan an outing. Also, a member of a work group may wish to call a group of experts to solve an urgent problem. People are now frequently faced with problems that require the input of multiple people to find an optimal solution. With the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, this kind of “spontaneous meeting” is possible. Indeed, because cell phones are most often associated with a single person's address, rather than a residential or group address, services can now be offered based on the assumption that the recipient of the call is the person who answered the telephone.
This kind of need is normally solved by conference calls, and in particular reservationless conference calls. However, conventional conference calls require the use of bridge resources and only support conferencing, not messaging and automatic reconnection of participants.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for providing simultaneous broadcasting of a message to a plurality of endpoint devices.